As far as that goes, can we really claim that what we do today measures up to ET? Considering scaling inharmonicity inconsistency, etc.? Our instructions should get us pretty close, but in practice, from tuner to tuner and from instrument to instrument, all kinds of variations exist. That's exactly my point. Even where ET is the nominal standard, variations are common. If ET could truly have been taken for granted, there would have been no need for its advocacy. We can question the influence of mathematical theorists like Sorge because few tuners probably read or could understand them, and Sorge had no known practical experience (most practitioners considered him a nut); anyway, Sorge's log calculations, while precise to several decimals, aren't always accurate in the MS he sent to Tannenberg, so while T'berg was aiming for ET he wouldn't have necessarily gotten it by following the instructions, or so I've been told. Also, ET is just one of several options Sorge offers, admittedly for organ tuning. Laurence This is an extreme example, of course, but the Baldwin 500 (spinet) scale, when equally divided with an ETD at the 4th partial, will produce contiguous thirds in the C28-C40 octave which do not progress evenly, but actually will progress in reverse, getting slower as you go up the scale, if the C28-C40 octave is to wind up anywhere close to acceptable. An aural tuning of this scale will create all sorts of problems if we try to force on it our aural definitions for ET. The errors in better scales certainly won't be as noticeable, but they will be there to some degree. Jeff -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100420/b6f25eb8/attachment.htm>
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